Smaller, energy efficient turbo card for A1200

[Snaggle]

It's a shame I'm making my first post on A.org and not using it to really add anything to the discussion but, ah well.

I too have been surprised by the availability of a 100MHz '060 card with an SDRAM DIMM slot for the Atari Falcon, while Amiga users are proudly displaying their 66MHz '060s (mostly only overclocked from 60MHz parts), and searching SIMM bins at computer fairs for that elusive 32MB+ SIMM that will work with their setup.  

Thinking about it, I suppose a refresh of an existing design could be made, with the larger/cheaper FPGAs/CPLDs around now it probably wouldn't cost any more than the original, even considering that it would be a comparatively small manufacturing run. The problem would be finding who owns the designs now (and would be far-sighted enough to realise that they are no longer worth holding onto the rights), and finding anyone experienced enough to take such a design and confidently update it for the new logic chips around now and the ( admittedly few) new features that buyers would demand.

Maybe a simplified Viper 1230 design could be made available for solder-junkies to assemble themselves, but don't expect a do-it-yourself Blizzard PPC (6 layer board?) anytime soon.

*Hopes for a 2 sided, single layer schematic for a CD32 '060 card to be released tomorrow for free*

[Snaggle]

Looking at the course this thread has taken I feel the need to add my opinion on some issues raised. Cos I'm so egotistical that I'm sure you all value that opinion highly.  ;-)

All those people saying that a new accelerator would not be commercially viable, you're damn right. No one could start a project like that expecting to make a nice profit at the end of it.
Then again, I've been scouring various Atari related sites recently and noticed a distinctly non-commercial attitude in many hardware projects.
You'd almost think some of these people were designing upgrades for the love of the platform or something.

Unlike those poor Atari savages, we've had companies like Phase 5, GVP, DCE, Elbox developing our hardware. But then, when most of those companies disappear cos there's no profit left in this market we have no homebrew hardware scene to take up the slack, and our maxed out A1200Ts are outperformed by Falcon 060s...

God knows making an accelerator card isn't remotely easy, but it's a lot easier now than it used to be, and we seem to have a lot more hardcore solder junkies around than we used to.
I'm not gonna start a campaign to get a new card out on the market or anything, but maybe the cynics could back off a little bit so the people with the know-how aren't so scared to come forward and make their contribution.
I know it's hard to stay calm when someone posts dodgy info or uninformed opinion, but this is just a discussion on a web forum. It's not life or death.

I wonder what that Rodolphe Czuba guy has been doing for the last year.
After all that hard work on the Phenix, it must've been heartbreaking to be let down by others so late in the development.
Take his 060 card, SDRAM interface, PCI bridge, and marry it to the basic 'magic-happy-chips' that every A1200 accelerator has (I don't know much about that stuff...) and you'd have an ultimate 1200 upgrade that I'd be happy with, even if it cost £200 for a board without CPU or any other socketed components.